Janet Halley

Janet Halley

Royall Professor of Law

Biography

Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton 2006), and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy (Duke 1999). With Wendy Brown, she coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke 2002), and with Andrew Parker she coedited After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011). She is the editor of a collection of essays entitled Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law, and the author of “What is Family Law?: A Genealogy,” published last year in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Her current book projects are The Family/Market Distinction: A Genealogy and Critique and Rape in Armed Conflict: Assessing the Feminist Vision and its Law. She is co-director of the Trafficking Roundtable and of the Up Against Family Law Exceptionalism Conference, an international collaboration dedicated to studying the role of the family and family law in colonization, decolonization and contemporary globalization. She was recently awarded the Career Achievement Award for Law and the Humanities by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. She teaches Family Law, Gender and the Family in Transnational Legal Orders, Gender in Postcolonial Legal Orders, Trafficking and Labor Migration, and courses on the intersections of legal theory with social theory.